Weekly Travel Theme: Wood #2 01-26-2014

Petrified Wood – Chaoyang, China

Here is my second entry for this weeks travel theme “wood.” This Petrified Wood was found near Chaoyang which is known as China’s “fossil city”. It is located in the Liaoning Province in northeast China, approximately a four-hour train ride from Beijing. These logs were at the same site where they discovered the of feathered dinosaur fossils. The fossils have been dated to 124 million years ago from the lower Cretaceous period. At that time there was a shallow lake in the area that was buried under layers of mud and volcanic ash which preserved the skeletons of many creatures in tact. Petrified Wood is literally “wood turned into stone”. It is the name given to a special type of fossilized remains of vegetation. It is the result of a tree having completely transitioned to stone by the process of permineralization in which all of the organic material is replaced with minerals while still retaining the original structure of the stem tissue.